remains. Mortain is now ruled, not by a count, but by a sub-prefect, and
the sub-prefect has made his home on the site of the home of the count.
The sub-prefect of Mortain is therefore in one sort to be envied above
all sub-prefects, and even prefects too. Such functionaries are commonly
quartered in some dull spot in the middle of a town. The sub-prefect of
Mortain dwells, and doubtless goes through the duties of his
sub-prefecture, in a fair house in a fair garden. That house is the
_chateau_ that is, on the site of the _chateau-fort_ that was, looking
down on the valley, looking up at the hills, looking across at the
church which marks the hermitage of the Blessed Vital. Whether from any
point he can actually look over on the lesser waterfall, one must be the
sub-prefect or his guest to know. Such is the change, and perhaps one
should not regret it; a sub-prefect is certainly a more peaceful
representative of authority than a mediaeval count. But he is less
picturesque and less ancient; and his dwelling follows the pattern of
its inhabitant. Sub-prefects are a fruit of the principles of 1789, and
it would doubtless be easy to find out who was the first of the
sub-prefects of Mortain. Nor is it hard to find out who was the first of
the counts. We came upon him in Malger, son of Duke Richard the
Fearless. But we are tempted to think that the first of the counts of
Mortain need not have been absolutely the first man to make himself a
stronghold on the peninsula rock of Mortain, whether for his own defence
or for the better harrying of his neighbours.
From Count Malger the castle of Mortain, and all that went with the
castle of Mortain, passed to his son William the Warling.[41] Such seems
to be the obvious English shape of _Warlencus_; but we have a natural
curiosity to know what a _Warling_ is, and why William was so called.
The name has an attractive sound, and some have seen in it that same
approach to a _warlock_ which Gibbon saw to a _wiseacre_ in the surname
of Robert Wiscard. We have also a natural curiosity to know whether
Duke William really had any good reason for banishing him, and thereby
giving the Wiscard another comrade in the Apulian wars. We care more for
the reputation of William the Great than for that of William the
Warling: the accuser of the Warling too was the first recorded
Bigod.[42] That is, he was the first who bore that name as a surname;
for Normans in general were scoffed at by Frenchmen as _bigods_,
_bigots_,--never mind the spelling or the meaning--and also as drinkers
of beer. We have that reverence for a much later Bigod that we had
rather not think that any Bigod told lies; but there is an awkward oath
which an intermediate Bigod took at the time of the election of Stephen.
So we will not venture to go beyond the fact that Duke William gave the
lands of the Warling to his half-brother Robert. We know him on Senlac;
we know him in Cornwall; we know him through all the western lands; we
know him most of all on that Montacute of his founding which once was
Leodgaresburh, scene of the Invention of the Holy Cross of Waltham.[43]
The West-Saxon knew Count Robert only as a spoiler, the Norman of
Mortain knew him as a great ecclesiastical founder. In 1082 he founded
the collegiate church of Saint Evroul "in castro Moretonii" for a Dean
and eight Canons, to whom seven more were added by other benefactors. He
also built or rebuilt the church, and, just as in the case of Harold at
Waltham, the language of the charter seems to imply that he built the
church first and then founded the canons to serve in it. There was a
time--it seems not so very long ago--when Gally Knight had to fight
against people who believed that the present church was of Count
Robert's own building. So to believe was indeed one degree less
grotesque than to believe that the far more advanced church of Coutances
was earlier still. Gally Knight easily saw that there was nothing in the
church which could be of Count Robert's time except the fine Romanesque
doorway on the south side. And even that we should now call too advanced
for Count Robert's own work; we should set it down for the last finish
of a building which doubtless took some time to make complete in all its
parts.
It is common enough in England to find a grand doorway of the twelfth
century left in a church where everything else has been rebuilt. Later
builders clearly admired them and spared them. Much more would this be
the case at Mortain, where the building of the new church must have
begun no very long time after the adding of this last finish to the old.
The style of the building is Transition, and advanced Transition; it is
all but early Gothic. The pointed arch alone is used; the only trace of
Romanesque feeling is to be seen in the short columns of the arcade, and
in the extreme simplicity of the triforium and clerestory, a single
unadorned lancet in each. The vaulting is naturally a little later; that
at least, with the English-looking shafts from which it springs, is in
the fully developed Pointed style.
The plan of the church of Saint Evroul, Mortain, is as simple as a
church that has aisles can be. We were going to say that it is a perfect
basilica; but no; the basilica commonly has the transepts and the arch
of triumph. At Mortain the same simple arcade runs round nave, choir,
and apse without break of any kind. Within the building the effect of
this austere and untouched simplicity--no one at Mortain has altered a
window or added a chapel--is perfectly satisfactory. Many buildings are
larger and more enriched; not many can be said to be more perfect
wholes. Save in the matter of multiplied aisles within and flying
buttresses without, Mortain may pass for Bourges in small. And, just as
at Bourges, the external outline is less satisfactory than the internal
effect. A single body of this kind has in itself no outline at all; it
depends on its tower or towers. At Mortain the usual central tower of a
great Norman church could not be; but neither has Saint Evroul the two
Western towers of Saint-Lo and Seez; the arrangement designed was rather
a development of the side towers common in the smaller churches of the
district. A tower on each side was designed and begun. They stand near
the east end; but they are not eastern towers like those of Geneva and
many German churches. They stand outside the aisles, so as not to
interrupt the continuous design within. They therefore do not really
group with the apse; they are detached towers whose lowest stage just
touches that of the church. But we are speaking as if both towers were
there. In truth only the southern one was carried up, and that only to a
height very little above the ridge of the roof, and there furnished with
a saddle-back. Such a tower lends the building hardly any increase of
outline in the distance, and in a near view it is chiefly remarkable for
the oddness of the wonderfully long coupled windows on the west side,
which are not continued all round. Save only the simple and graceful
west front and the general goodness of the design and execution, the
beauties of the church of Mortain are certainly to be sought within.
The castle looks up at the church, which stands on the rather steep
slope of the hill, the effect of which is that the east end can hardly
be seen, except from a considerable distance. Above it is the _hospice_,
with the fragment of a church with a saddle-back to its central tower.
Above again is the chapel of Saint Michael. Of quite another value from
Saint Michael is a church a little way out of Mortain, in the near
neighbourhood of the waterfalls, with rocks above it and rocks below.
This is the church of nuns known as _l'Abbaye Blanche_, a foundation of
Count William of Mortain in 1105. As the next year he was taken at
Tinchebray and kept in prison for the rest of his days, he was not
likely to do much in the way of building. The church described long ago
by Gally Knight and De Caumont is palpably later than his day. It is of
the Transition, and it is a much less advanced example of the Transition
than the church of Mortain. Whatever Count William meant to found, the
actual house was Cistercian, and the church carries Cistercian severity
to its extremest point. One thinks of Kirkstall; but Kirkstall, plain as
it is, drew majesty from its grand and simple outline; the White Abbey
is small; it has, through the lack of a central tower, no outline
without, and its small scale hinders the effect of Kirkstall.[44] One
might even say that, in buildings of this class--not in those of more
elaborate design--something is gained, as with the monuments of Rome, by
being somewhat out of repair. Anyhow, in connexion with Mortain, the
White Abbey does not lack architectural importance. It is very odd if
anybody took the collegiate church to be the older. The White Abbey is a
truly Cistercian building, a simple cross with a flat east end, no
aisles to the nave, but chapels east of the transepts. It follows the
usual law of Transitional buildings. The main constructive arches are
pointed; the windows are round-headed in the eastern part, pointed in
the western. The cloister and chapter-house have round arches; the
remains of the cloister have small single shafts, not the Saracenic
coupling to which we have got used in Italy, Sicily, and Southern Gaul.
In an odd position to the west of the church, forbidding any west front,
is an undercroft with columns with good, but not very rich,
twelfth-century capitals, clearly of a piece with the cloister.
Lastly, on the opposite side of the valley, forming a picturesque object
on the road from Mortain to the White Abbey, is the small plain church
of Neufbourg. The spot marks the solitary dwelling of the Blessed Vital,
him who strove to make peace between the contending brothers at
Tinchebray, and who gave up his prebend at Mortain and all that he had,
to dwell as a hermit amid the woods and rocks.[45] The church, bating a
few later insertions, is a perfect Transitional cross church, with a
flat east end and no aisles. In this part of Normandy the small churches
that one lights on in the villages, though commonly of pleasing
outline, have seldom any remarkable work. In this they are distinguished
in a marked way from the wonderful series of parish churches round Caen
and Bayeux. Those we are tempted to compare with the churches of our own
Holland, Marshland, and Northern Northamptonshire. But the comparison
does not strictly apply. In each case there is a series of notable
churches which never were collegiate or monastic. But in the English
district the churches are, as parish churches, of considerable size,
sometimes indeed very large, though never affecting the character of a
minster. The churches in the Bessin are mainly small, but of singular
excellence of work, largely Romanesque of the twelfth century. We may
come to some of them before we have done.
MORTAIN TO ARGENTAN
1892
One great object in the parts of Mortain is to see the historic site of
Tinchebray, so closely connected with Mortain in its history, though the
two places are, and seem always to have been, in different divisions,
ecclesiastical and civil. We debate whether Tinchebray can be best got
at from Mortain, Vire, or Flers. Mortain would be the best way by
railway, if only trains ran on every part of the line. But between
Sourdeval and Tinchebray no trains now run. We rule then that Tinchebray
will be best got at by road from Flers, and owing to the gap on the
railway, the way by train from Mortain to Flers is by Vire. We thus get
a few hours at Vire. It is the Feast of the Assumption; the great church
is crowded with worshippers. It is therefore impossible to make a study
of its interior. But we can see that it has a grand nave, nearly of the
same style as Mortain, but loftier. There are many additions and changes
in the later styles, and the only tower is at the side and of no great
height. We would fain see more of this church on some less venerated
day. Then there is the gateway with the tower-belfry; there is the
donjon on its mound, crowning another of the peninsular heights on which
castles rose, this time a real peninsula, with the river below from
which the town takes its name. There is a glimpse to be taken of the
famous valley of Vire, and we go back to the station to betake us to
Flers. It is not altogether for the sake of its own merits that we go to
Flers, but because we have ruled that it is on the whole the best place
from whence to make the journey to Tinchebray. Flers, we imagine, is as
old as other places; but there seems to be nothing to say about it. It
has no church of any importance, it has a respectable castle of late
mediaeval lines, standing in a real moat. This has become in an odd way a
dependency of a later house, which happily has not swallowed it up.
Flers itself has of late years risen to some importance as a
manufacturing town. And we are bound to say that these French
manufacturing towns look much cleaner and tidier than their fellows in
England. But for historical and antiquarian purposes Flers counts for
very little. And it is, after all, possible that it may not be the best
starting point for Tinchebray. We cannot say till we have made the
attempt from Vire.
We had meant to go by carriage from Flers to Tinchebray, and to take on
the way La Lande-Patry the house of that William Patry who appears in
Wace as having entertained Earl Harold as a guest at the time of his
stay in Normandy. And we did get to La Lande-Patry another day. Strange
to say, while De Caumont spoke of traces of the castle in the past
tense, Joanne, so much later, spoke of them in the present. At any rate,
the thing was worth trying; one might at least muse on the spot. We
found the place a little way from Flers, a church and a few houses,
called distinctively La Lande-patry, as distinguished from a
neighbouring village called by some such name as _La Fontaine de Patry_.
The church is not quite wholly new, though it is mostly so; but there is
nothing that could have been built or looked on by any one who received
Harold. Nor do we distinctly see anything in the way of mounds or
ditches. And yet we flatter ourselves that we have lighted on the site.
He who has read Wace's story of Duke William's ride from Valognes and of
his greeting by Hubert of Rye will remember how Hubert was standing
"entre le moutier et la motte."[46] The "moutier" and the "motte," the
church and the castle, have, in these places, a way of standing near
together. So, having got the church and marked that it stands on a bit
of high ground with a slope to the south-east, we run down a lane and
into a field to the north-west, and there find a charming site for the
"motte." The little hill rises with a fair amount of steepness above a
flat piece of land with a small stream wriggling about in it. Then we go
on and find that there is a near slope to the north-east also, so we
have our "moutier" and the almost certain site of our "motte." They are
fixed, as they should be, on one end of a peninsular hill, though we
must confess that the hill is not very lofty. Here then, we feel fairly
satisfied, it was that William Patry--written, it seems, in Latin
_Patricius_--welcomed as a peaceful guest the Earl whom in after-days he
was to meet in arms as King on the day of the great battle.[47]
But Tinchebray is much more than La Lande-Patry, and the site is much
more certain. There it was, as Englishmen at the time deemed, that the
assize of God's judgment on Senlac was reversed after forty years.[48]
England had been won by the Duke of the Normans; Normandy was now to be
won by a King of the English. To be sure the English King was the son of
the Norman Duke; but he was born in England; he spoke the English
tongue; Englishmen had chosen him to be their king rather than his
purely Norman brother. King Henry's host was most likely far more
largely Norman--specially West-Norman--than English; the chief men above
all were Norman; still there were Englishmen in it, and those
Englishmen looked on the fight as a national struggle and on the result
as a national victory. William of Malmesbury witnesses to the feeling;
it is odd that there is not a word of it in "Ordericus Angligena,"
writing at Saint-Evroul. We read our Orderic; we read the little that
there is in Wace; we read the contemporary account in a letter by a
Norman partisan of Henry. We then go forth to make out what we can of
the site, knowing perfectly well that we shall not find a castle
standing up as at Falaise.
The railway takes us from Flers to Montsecret junction, and from
Montsecret junction to Tinchebray station. We are looking out for a
possible site for the battle, and we soon rule that the ground where the
station itself stands, the flat ground to the north of the town, will do
perfectly well for the purpose; but we do not as yet know whether there
may not be some other site which may do equally well. We walk up from
the station, and we find Tinchebray itself a somewhat larger town than
we had looked for, though still but small. It strikes us almost at once
that it is a town of the same class as Carlisle, Stirling, and
Edinburgh, where a single long street, with more or less of slope, leads
up to a castle at one end. Here at Tinchebray it is the east end, where
the castle hill rises boldly enough over the little stream of the
Noireau, the Norman Blackwater, which gives a surname to that Conde
which became the seat of princes. On the opposite side of the narrow and
grassy valley rise higher hills on which King Henry may well have
planted his _Malvoisin_. To the south, the hills have withdrawn to a
greater distance; the castle hill rises above a meadow which in times
past seems to have been a marsh. On the northern side, the hill slopes
away more gradually to the plain. Here the castle must have trusted
wholly to its own defences. It is on this north side only, where the
railway runs, that the battle could have been fought. For the fight of
Tinchebray really was a battle, one of the very few pitched battles of
the age. The campaign indeed began in an attack on the fortress; but it
grew into something more on both sides. And it is only to the north that
there was room for the operations of two armies of any size; the earlier
besieging could take place from all points, but specially, one would
think, from the east and north. But we have to make out these things as
well as we can from the look of the ground. The contemporary accounts
give us the facts; but they give them without local colouring.
Of the buildings of the castle fairly full accounts have been preserved,
which may be studied in a History of Tinchebray in three volumes by the
Abbe L.V. Dumaine (Paris: 1883). It is a book most praiseworthy for
bringing together all manner of local facts of all manner of dates. And
it is full of plans and plates to illustrate particular subjects. For
historical criticism we do not look; but we should have liked a clear
plan of the castle and town, and, if possible, the reproduction of some
old drawing of the castle, such as one often finds. As things are, we
have to put up with M. Dumaine's description. Towards the river and the
marsh the castle trusted mainly to its natural defences; but at least on
the side towards the town it had a ditch which has now vanished. The
gates are gone, but the likeness survives of a building near the eastern
gate with two pointed arches rising from a pillar, known as _Les
Porches_. Here was the _Champ Belle-Noe_, and on the hill on the
opposite site of the valley was _Beaulieu_. The names were not ill
deserved; the stream and its accompaniments make a pleasant look-out.
But of the buildings of the castle nothing now is left; the utmost that
we can do is to make out, not the eastern gate itself, but its site. No
walls and bulwarks stand up; we must be content with calling up an
imagination what there once was. But that is enough; the castle of
Henry's day standing up would be best of all; a simple empty space would
be next best; but the scattered buildings of the little suburb which
occupies the castle site do not seriously hinder us from understanding
what we want to understand. In other lines all that Tinchebray has to
show is a desecrated fragment of the church of Saint Remigius just
outside the castle. Here is a central tower with a very short eastern
limb. On the eastern face of the tower is a Romanesque arcade, so very
simple and even rude that one is inclined to assign it to a time a good
bit earlier than the day of Tinchebray. But there is no such arcade on
the other sides, and the western arch of the tower is pointed. What are
we to infer when the place is locked and it is hopeless trying to get
the key? We do at least remember that the four lantern-arches at Saint
David's are not all of the same date; and we hope that, whenever the
pointed arch was made, the plain arcade was there on the 28th day of
September, 1106, just forty years after the father of the contending
princes had landed at Pevensey.
Our accounts are not very clear in their topography, and they do not
distinctly point out the site of the battle. The relieving force under
Duke Robert and Count William came from Mortain--that is, from the
south-west. A striking tale is told of their march. In crossing the
forest of _Lande-Pourrie_ to the south of Tinchebray the army heard mass
under a tree from the mouth of Vital, the holy solitary of Neufbourg.
Count William was his lord, if one who had renounced the world could be
said to have an earthly lord, and he was only in his allegiance if he
accompanied the forces of Mortain. The object of the holy man was to
reconcile the brothers, and he made an attempt on the mind of Henry
also. But, according to Orderic, the King of the English was able to
show that the fault rested wholly with Robert, and that he himself had
entered Normandy only from the purest motives. Anyhow arms were to
decide. Only on what spot? The south side of the castle, the natural
approach from Mortain, gave no opportunities for fighting an open
battle, hardly even for an assault on the castle. The ducal army, with
William of Mortain and the terrible Robert of Belleme, must have gone
round to some other point. The name of _Champ Henriet_, borne by a site
to the west of the town, therefore away from the castle, does not seem
to prove much. The north side seems to furnish the best fighting-ground,
and it is the weakest side of the castle. The King's forces would most
likely be on that side, and the Duke would come round to attack them.
But one cannot pretend to certainty.
The combatants, some of them, awaken a more lively interest than the
immediate scene of their exploits. It is hard to throw ourselves into
the feeling of those men of the time who saw in the fight of Tinchebray
a national victory of Englishmen over Normans. In some sort it was so;
from that day no once could say that a Duke of the Normans held England;
it was the King of the English who held Normandy. And the invasion of
Normandy by Englishmen and their King, and the fighting of the
victorious battle on the forty years' anniversary of the Conqueror's
landing, could not have failed to strike men's minds. One strange
turning-about of things indeed there was. The man whom Englishmen had
once chosen as their King, the heir of Alfred, Cerdic, and Woden, fought
at Tinchebray in the following of Duke Robert. Eadgar and Robert had
been comrades in the Crusade, and the two men were not unlike in
character. Neither could ever act for himself; both could sometimes act
for others. And if Eadgar thought at all, he may have seen a rival in
Henry, while he assuredly could not have seen one in Robert. Anyhow the
AEtheling who had marched on York with Waltheof and Maerleswegen now
marched on Tinchebray with William of Mortain and Robert of Belleme.
Englishmen may well have seen a truer countryman in the son of the
Conqueror, born in England, chosen to his crown by Englishmen and
leading Englishmen to battle, than in the grandson of AEthelred, born in
Hungary, and fighting alongside of the foreign oppressors whom England
and her King had cast out. And the best and the worst of the warrior
princes and nobles of the time were there on opposite sides. With Duke
Robert came Robert of Belleme, no longer of Shrewsbury or Arundel. With
King Henry came the Count of Maine, Helias of La Fleche.